The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail Classics)

by Fernando Pessoa

Richard Zenith (Translator)

The prizewinning, complete and unabridged translation—“the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever” (The Guardian)—of a work of unclassifiable genius: the crowning achievement of Portugal’s modern master

Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography

Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation

A Penguin Classic

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."
 
Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

“Pessoa is a genius.” —André Aciman

• ISBN10: 0141183047
• ISBN13: 9780141183046
• Publish Date: 31 December 2002 (first published 28 May 1991)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 31 October 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 544
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780141183046

Reviews

[brokentune]

DNF.

God, this was awful.

I wanted to punch that hateful little shit of a narrator/main character on the nose within the first ten pages of the book.

I get that the cynicism is an expression of the guy's struggle to find something to value in his life, but that doesn't make him a metaphor of the modern literary hero or indeed anything I can value.

Apparently, a lot of people have found some deep insights in his ramblings. Good on them. To me, the narrator's (or Pessoa's??) ignorant, arrogant, disdainful stream-of-consciousness blether held more cliches than a piece of hackneyed journalism, signifying nothing.

And if the intro to the book is correct and the MC is an alter ego of Pessoa himslef (who hadn't actually published this in his lifetime), then that is rather sad.